It took almost 40 years, but Kinsey’s brain blew up last week. I’m always going to wonder if that glass-smashing concussion weakened something in his head.

Anyway, he’s not dead yet. That’s why we’re gathered around him, although we’re kind of a second tier. Kinsey has had a pretty good run: enduring marriage, two grown kids who still like him, business success and social adequacy. His prognosis is not good, but most of the folks standing around his hospital bed are immediate family. A few of us old buddies see him for a bit in the afternoon.

We can’t share pot with him. Kinsey never liked edibles and his respiratory system can’t take even vaping. But we promised to bring him a peach.

It’s not impossible. We can find Frog Hollow produce and pay $3. But we thought the errand would be easy. A peach, in July, in California. Turns out they’re not so common, these days.

It turns out that, while demand for good pot drove the quality and prices upward in the last 40 years, demand for good peaches dropped. To keep prices from rising, quality was sacrificed, and apparently few realized this.

Why, I was in a small market a month ago, greedily popping Santa Rosa plums into a produce bag. They’re so sweet&sour delicious, and they’re never around for long. A fellow shopper edged up to my side and put her hand forth to choose plums. “Aren’t they wonderful?” I voiced. “Oh yes,” she replied, and her face lit up as she added “if you slice them, they make a fabulous fruit tart.”

“Really,” I remember replying. “I just eat them out of the bag.” A cloud of disconnection passed over her countenance as she turned her attention back to the plums.

The next fruit event that struck me was at my brother and sister-in-law’s house, two weeks ago. They have a productive organic garden in their backyard. My sister-in-law spends time working in it every day. I came for a home-grown dinner, and the salad and stir-fried veggies were just picked and excellent. But my sister-in-law harvested over a gallon of fresh berries right before I arrived, and she bragged to me about the quantity that she had immediately frozen, for morning smoothies. Not for a minute did she consider offering fresh berries as part of the meal.

And yesterday, behind a well-built young man who was paying for a large bag of loose carrots, the cashier smiled and said, “I guess someone’s going to make some juice.” The young customer didn’t agree. “I just like to eat carrots,” he stated to the then-uninterested clerk.

How the mighty has fallen. Not only have California highways and schools collapsed in our lifetimes, but the state managed to peak as a produce provider and then decline. I was surprised a few years ago to encounter much better fruit in Paris than in Berkeley. I was disoriented by the custom there of having the purveyor select and bag the items for the customer. Why was I surprised? Agribusiness toxins are not allowed in Europe. And who is better qualified than the merchant to know the best fruit? But most of us in the States won’t phone in a produce order, because we don’t trust the seller to send us the best. We are cynics. We expect our merchants to be interested only in a quick profit. And then we engineer our culture to make that cynicism justified.

We persisted. We splurged on a dozen peaches. We went early this morning to the farmers’ market and we asked the seller to help us find the best fruit for a significant event. Her face lit up. Her smile pushed her cheeks toward her eyes and made those orbs sparkle at us. We came away with some magnificent specimens.

And we shared the peaches with Kinsey this afternoon. He’s degenerated quite a bit since yesterday. He seemed to recognize us, but he wasn’t talking. And he opened his mouth when we held a peach slice to it, took it in, chewed a little and swallowed, but he didn’t act like it was his idea or like he wanted more.